Slowly but surely, our lives have become all stick and no carrot – thanks, boomers

The trouble with being a writer is that people expect you – not unreasonably – to put what they are thinking and feeling into words. It is, supposedly, our job, and an important one at that. Well, at least we like to pretend that it is.

I have tried to put my feelings about the climate emergency into words for several hours now, and I have failed. There is a new report out, as I’m sure you have seen, and I have no idea how to approach it. I am not quite seething but not quite sad either; I am too passionate to be nihilistic but too jaded to feel truly panicked.

Should I change my behaviour some more to do my bit? Should I decide that my refusal to ever drive and the £10 I spend on carbon offsetting every month is enough? Should I campaign against fossil fuel companies? For better laws to protect the environment?

As an excellent piece from CapX pointed out last month, figuring out what helps the planet and what doesn’t isn’t even straightforward anymore. Wrapping vegetables in plastic actually makes them last longer, so we should support it; importing fruit from sunnier countries is actually greener than growing it here. Should I have a glass of wine with lunch and move on with my day?

After all, it isn’t even like the burning planet is the only problem we are facing at the moment. There is the global pandemic – you know the one – and the fact that, if you are under 35, you will probably never own a home or ever feel truly financially stable.

Wear a mask, avoid seeing too many people, work hard, save all the money you earn, don’t eat meat, don’t take planes... Slowly but surely, our lives have become all stick and no carrot. How to react?

The answer to this question came to me this morning when I left the house and, for perhaps the 12th time in a week, immediately got rained on. The first three or four times I got rained on in the past seven days made me annoyed; the three or four after that made me furious, and the three or four after that made me sad. This one made me feel nothing.

I walked in the rain, my newly blow-dried hair getting steadily wetter and wetter, and I did not experience a single emotion. I felt ... well, I felt blank, and so I thought of Richard Hell and the Voidoids, who were either proto-punks or some of the first-ever punks, depending on who you ask, and their 1976 song “Blank Generation”. The song starts with a plaintive, “I was saying ‘let me out of here’ before I was even born”, and its chorus, “I belong to the blank generation; I can take it or leave it each time”, has become a cult classic for the downcast everywhere.

As a suspiciously incisive note on the Genius lyrics website explains, long before Douglas Coupland’s famous Generation X, Richard Hell described the unknown, blank quality of the post-baby boomer generation as “aimless, disillusioned, burnt-out, paralysed by the broken promises of the boomers and the Sixties counterculture”. Hard not to wince, isn’t it?

Still, the purpose of Hell’s “Blank Generation” isn’t to be morose for its own sake. As he said himself in an interview some years later: “It wasn’t that I was being negative, just I was looking around and seeing what things were like!”

Things, in his case and ours, were and are bad, and ignoring it would not make the bad things go away. We have a government determined to talk big and act small on green policies and an opposition that struggles to make itself heard at the best of times. International cooperation only works when it is convenient, and things can always get kicked further down the road.

We are exhausted and wrung out after making countless sacrifices over the past year and a half, and the only thing waiting for us at the end of this particular tunnel is more sacrifices. There is a new report on global warming and it is “code red for humanity”. It probably will not be the last report of its kind.

Does this mean we should give up and embrace climate nihilism? Of course not – as Hell said about his song: “You can be in a stunned state and express it as anger and pain.” But this doesn’t mean the blankness of it all must be ignored; no one wants to get rained on, and no one wants the planet to burn to a crisp. Sometimes all we can do is embrace the void, if only for a little while.